Southwest Medical Center is proud to announce that Benjamin Muñoz, DNP, APRN, FNP-C, has joined the provider team at Southwest Care Center as a family nurse practitioner.
Muñoz has been part of the Southwest Medical Center team since 2013, having worked in the Medical-Surgical and Intensive Care Unit. Now, with over a decade of hands-on experience, he is expanding his role as a bilingual primary care provider for the community he has long served.
The Baker Arts Center has been looking to expand its permanent collection, and an artistic donation was made to help with just that.
Recently, the Baker Arts Center accepted a donation of two pieces by artist Ken Crost, and Baker Arts Center Director Brittyn Heronemus said she was very happy with how the donation occurred.
Project Justice is a non-profit organization focused on solving cold cases, particularly those involving unidentified remains, by funding advanced DNA testing and forensic genealogy.
The entity recently celebrated its 50th solved case, a nearly 20-year-old mystery in Yavapai County, Ariz. As Project Justice co-founder Justin Woo tells it, it was very thrilling to receive the news at the end of June.
Watkins Public Strategies has played an important part in getting the voice of Southwest Kansas heard for multiple years, and this past Kansas Legislature session kept them quite busy.
“This session, we saw the election last fall of all 165 House and Senate members, so we have a new legislature coming in, and there are many of those who are returning, but we still saw almost one-third of the legislative body as newcomers,” Watkins Public Strategies Vice President Jessica Lucas said. “On top of the changes of elected officials, we also had a new schedule in how the Legislature has decided to go to a 90 calendar day session as opposed to a 90-day session – in the past, we would have seen our work extended into May, and I've been there before when it was extended into June. This year, we were done and totally wrapped up by April, so it was a much speedier process. And then, to add a new layer to the session, the Legislature also decided they wanted to have their own budget – historically, a budget would have looked like the governor creating a product and then all of the work was built off of that. The Legislature would examine the governor's budget and then say 'We like this, we'll keep it in' or 'We're going to take X away' or whatever the situation ultimately calls for. But everything was done from the governor's budget. This year, the Legislature basically took the governor's budget, set it aside, and started from their own work product, which resembled the 2024 budget pared down from everything that had any type of what they called one-time expenses. It was just a different year that resulted in a lot of fast-paced movement and many, many changing dynamics.”
